Description & Goal

SELLA (Social Entrepreneurship Lessons Learned for Armenia) aims to demonstrate inspirational stories on social entrepreneurship, and lessons learned from successful social enterprises (with the relevant information on state support, and policy context for each case) around the world, including those in the United Kingdom, in order to raise the level of social entrepreneurship knowledge in Armenia to the next level of impact, profitability and sustainability.

Objectives

There are several dozen social enterprises operating in Armenia, most of which have been founded through funding by grant programmes. While these social enterprises are doing good work, many of them remain small, with limited impact and profitability, which also makes their sustainability vulnerable. Several projects are focusing on promoting knowledge and awareness on social entrepreneurship in Armenia, but there is still a deficit when it comes to case studies and other material on social enterprise success stories and lessons learned from different countries available in the Armenian language and relevant to the local context.

The SELLA project aims to make these success stories available to stakeholders in the Armenian social entrepreneurship ecosystem through webinars with social enterprises from other countries, including the United Kingdom, translation of available video material, discussion events. By making this material publicly available, the project will:

Supplement ongoing efforts on social entrepreneurship by promoting success stories and lessons learned from real-life cases, which will include specialized knowledge for existing social enterprises in Armenia

Help make the concept of social entrepreneurship more understandable to members of the general public and other stakeholders (including state institutions) who are just starting to demonstrate an interest in the area

Content updates, learning materials and videos of the project will be continuously published in this webpage.

Case Study #1 – Cracked It

Founded by Josh Babarinde in 2016, Cracked It supports young people just out of prison – the mission was to prevent them from going back to prison by helping them find meaningful jobs. The case studies for Cracked It are available in both Armenian and English.